Remote work also makes sense and they just fucking ignore that.
Commercial real estate isn’t worth nearly as much without people going to and from work everyday.
That’s not a bad thing
Correct, but thats the real reason for the back to office push. No one cares where you are, so long as someone has to pay for you to be there.
You put on your work clothes, which are basically the same as regular clothes but more expensive. You commute to work, you consume radio/podcast/whatever, you consume ads. You get into the lobby of your building and get a coffee from the stand that pays rent. You take the elevator to the rented offices you work at. You get exploited as much as is legally allowable for 4 hours. You go back downstairs and buy food from another rent payer. You go back upstairs and get exploited some more. You consume more advertising on the way home. You get home too tired and too late to disrupt anything that makes rich guys richer.
None of the real reasons are productivity related.
So? Sunk costs
Don’t threaten me with a good time
Healthcare for all makes sense in NUMEROUS WAYS and they won’t give us that
you don’t climb the corporate ladder and attain to c suite positions of authority by being the type of person who think employees even deserve 2 days off, let alone 3. these are also the type of people who demand that you answer the phone/emails between 5pm and 9am
Employers: have you considered 6 days?
It’s a deal! Six days off, one on.
I did that shit. 6 days, you find out your start time about 12 hours before it happens each day (make sure you’re up to get the phone call about what time to come in, it could vary by 5 hours). Your work day could be from 4 hours to potentially more than 14.
I moved to a 5 day position at the same company… 60 hours a week. 5 12s. Hourly, but no overtime pay.
Trucking is great isn’t it
Welcome to Greece🥲
Plenty of people work 7 days now. Big profits for the top, poor compensation for the bottom.
Schools do that 😔
Insightful. Accurate. Gdi.
This is only for white collar work. Every time I see this there is never any consideration for blue collar work. Factories would benefit from seven day work weeks, more time producing not less.
Not that I want it at all… We tried to argue for just 4 days weeks in the summer when it gets to be 95° and like 75° dew point and they still said “absolutely not, we need to ship 5 days a week. We have guys doing overtime why would we do less?”
Factories suck…
I mean, a four day work week still benefits blue collar jobs, though it’s understandably more difficult to implement this in a some blue collar workspaces, and I dont claim to have the answer for how to do it by any means.
Factories would benefit from seven day work weeks, more time producing not less.
Factories benefit from higher efficiency, and less downtime, which can be achieved with more employees, working less, being less tired, more satisfied with their pay and benefits, and having fewer accidents which interrupt production.
It can be done, but other systems also need changing to help it along.
I think the problem there is that there’s a lot of workplaces looking for extra people. Losing 1/5th of your workforce, but not financially is how I assume employers look at it.
The fact people are more efficient probably doesn’t mean more efficient than working 8 extra hours to them.
I could really do with a 4day workweek. And I don’t mean working 40h in 4 days.
I absolute agree with you that that is how employers are viewing it and I agree with your disagreement with people in the industry that suggest the solution is ten hour days for blue collar workers.
(One of) The problem(s) behind this is that the capital class seemingly does not care what the evidence shows, and are only interested in what feels more productive. To them, it feels more productive to have fewer workers, for longer hours, with less safety measures, and because they feel it’s more efficient, that means it must be (because it costs
more“less”). Until we change that, or sufficiently collectivize to force them to change, it’s gonna be hard to move the needle.100% this right here. The owner-class have been deluding themselves for damn near 100 years at this point that we’re not working long enough or hard enough. Henry Ford figured out exactly how much work he could squeeze out of an assembly line peon, set the requirement at exactly that point, and structured the entire operation around that 8 hours a day, five days per week quotient.
The modern CEO runs on feelings of “Well I work 12 hours per day 7 days per week, so it’s not much to ask that my rank-and-file workers put in an extra hour or two per day for the sake of the company!” while discounting or ignoring the fact that there’s a compensation gap of approximately 100x or more. Not everybody is CEO-brained enough to pull a 12 hour day every day and still have energy left over to perform basic functions in what little free time they have remaining that isn’t dedicated to sleeping.
In reality, we need to be organizing to force companies to start paying us what they owe, and if they don’t want to match our salaries with the astronomical increase in production that has taken place over the years thanks to computerization and automation, then they need to let us have more time off from work without a reduction in pay. It’s only fair.
On top of the issue you mentioned, and along with another comment referring to machine operators, the capital class sees us as meat machines, not people. Especially machine operators, even in my own job some people refer to them as button pressers… I’m in a psudo-supervisor type position but I’m not viewed as any more than a meat machine either… We’re “undeserving” of any proper treatment because we “don’t create value” we’re just “necessary” like power is necessary.
The fact people are more efficient probably doesn’t mean more efficient than working 8 extra hours to them.
Exactly, for a lot of manufacturing the bottleneck is how quickly machines run. For example right now I work in an electronics plant and our surface mount lines are limited solely by machine runtime. The operator is only there to swap out empty component reels as needed, load stacks of bare boards in ocasionally, and place the rare hand placed component. An especially slow operator can of course slow things down a bit if they can’t do those tasks quickly enough, but it is very rare for the operator to be the bottleneck. There is a direct linear relationship between hours run and quantity of product produced usually regardless of operator efficiency.
There is no way my employer would ever pay the machine operators the same amount to work less. It is actually in my employers financial best interests to have the machine operators work as much overtime as possible because the amount they pay for benefits is not based on hours worked so even with overtime pay included, the amount they pay per manhour is actually slightly reduced past a certain overtime threshhold.
What about rotating 3 and 4 day shifts for twice as many employees? Then you get 7 days of productivity and nobody is getting burned out/making an unsafe work environment?
Maybe they should hire more people to fill in the gaps to those who leave for the week after 4 days. Everyone deserves 4 day work weeks at minimum.
That would cost them more so it’s a non-starter. In manufacturing you’re not a human, you’re another tool. You don’t consider the wellbeing or happiness of your tools. :(
Imagine how boomers brains will melt when the four day week starts roughly when they all hit retirement. I would take that as consolation price for the failing pension systems.
As if arguments matter.
Now if possible legal and contract things allow it get fixed and a number of employers start to offer this and pull in valuable workers… That might make the others nervous.
It’s already happening, at least in my social circle. People changing to four day weeks or even changing jobs when their employer doesn’t offer reduced work weeks.
It’s a slow trickle but it’s there.
Indeed, this is how the change will be made.
Dumb question: how does this work? Is a person paid the same for less hours? What if they are hourly?
If they’re hourly it usually goes to a 4x10 instead of 5x8 so that the hours are kept the same
The trick is how to make this work with 24/7 businesses. Now we have a set of 5 day workers that have full benefits and 2 day workers that have partial benefits. If the full benefit workers only work 4 days and the partial benefits workers now work 3, they will be pushing for full benefits as well. That means more cost to the business.
its the only real path to 24/7. As it stands now you can run 24/7 but you won’t. weekends will never run like weekdays and its not for a lack of demand on the weekends. 4 day work week is primed for a two shift solution with one day where the shifts can collaborate.
In my case it’s a security job, so it’s not like you need twice as many people one day. But I can see how that would work for certain industries.
4 12s one week, 3 12s the other, 4 shifts. I used to have that at an old job and it was kind of nice having 2 days off in the middle of the week and every other weekend having three days off. It would be Tuesday,Wednesday, Then Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Then Thursday, Friday.
I suppose you could do this on 8 hours and have 6 shifts instead of only 4. So only a 28 hour work week on average 24/32.
Maybe dont tie healthcare to jobs? That is the most expensive ‘benefit’ they offer.
Agreed, but that makes it a MUCH harder problem to solve.
The main opposition is not employers. As long as they maintain profit, they don’t care and that has long been shown as possible .
The main opponent to this will be government, who don’t want people to have to much free time on their hands, in case they call out inequalities and injustice.
Meh, I work in medicine; we’re stuck with 7 days forever.
But you have shifts and dayoffs that just don’t necessarily correlate with the weekend, right? Or do you live in the Land of Free where there are no employees rights?
I don’t work in healthcare but I know plenty of people who do. The industry is notoriously understaffed, and of course there are sudden emergencies you have to deal with. Therefore, they pretty much require 24/7 operations.
Operations /=/ employee hours. The understaffing is the issue.
Iaal and I would fucking kill for just a standard 40 hour, 5 day work week at this point 😓
My direct supervisor would love that at least.
Corporate real estate companies too especially for in the office
And also a minimum of 6 weeks paid vacation, and also they get recorded as clocked in on those days so employers can’t easily discriminate against employees that actually use that time.
Omg, I laughed so boisterously at this. I mean loud.
This meme is confusing to me.
If the list of arguments is about productivity increases, then employers wouldn’t run away from it, they don’t care how they get more job done as long as it’s done.
If the list of arguments is about how employees would personally benefit from it, the employers still wouldn’t run from it because those arguments aren’t arguments to them and they don’t care.
I disagree. Leaders in both private and public sector make idiotic less productive decisions all the time. We’re especially seeing that from the return to office crap.
Productivity isn’t important to them, control is. It is, always, about control over people’s lives. Money isn’t what matters, it’s just how they keep score.
This. There are employers out there who want you at their beck and call at ALL hours. Not because it “improves efficiency / productivity” but because they just want to fark with your personal life to the point where you don’t have one anymore. To make you miserable. Being able to control you all the time is what gets them off.
It’s flexing power.
Their central pursuit of capital is just the pursuit of power to wield over others.
At scale, beyond meeting personal material needs/wants, that’s what capital becomes, power over others.
You can fuck off and indulge all your hobbies in a mansion on the beach for the rest of your life long before you hit a billion dollars, but at those levels you want to influence elections/culture and control ever more people and resources. I consider it mental illness, I wish the rest of our society did as well.
they don’t care how they get more job done as long as it’s done.
That is a ridiculous assertion.
Employers in the US absolutely care about flexing power for the sake of flexing power. It’s why many are against WFH (for their employees, not themselves of course) despite it being shown not to decrease productivity,
Do you believe employers desire for ever MOAR somehow doesn’t extend to having more perks and time than their underlings? Employees having more days off DEVALUES the employer fucking off for drinks and golf, oh I’m sorry “networking,” at noon every day by comparison.
Of course there are exceptions, but the larger the employer, the fewer there are, as growth/metastasis is a reflection of the insatiability of the employer’s greed. The ones with any temperance eventually stop, the ones that are incapable of being satiated don’t.
The type of person making these decisions is typically psychopathic and stubborn. 4 day work weeks may be objectively better for everyone but if it’s not a common-sense productivity increaser, expect no change, at least in the US where corporate interests are extremely protected.
In other words they just don’t believe it’s true?
Yes, because people in high positions of power self-select for negative personality traits that would make them more likely to distrust obvious facts if it means improving the lives of those they control.
Don’t believe or don’t care. Workers are less likely to collectivize if they spend 80% of their time under the supervision of someone who’s paid to stop any discussion of that kind.
